Bull Connor, the chief lawman, colluded with the Klan so they could carry out bloody mayhem on Freedom Riders. Given the context, it would seem a gross distortion of perspective to see in Kings and his fellow protesters actions a danger to law and order comparable to that posed by pro-segregation extremists. Americans trust in government has fallen to historic lows as our partisan divisions and animosities have intensified; In the recent wave of protests and calls for protest one can find semblances of the first approach, but those more closely resembling the second model have predominated. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to co-operate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. To say that less radical measures are to be preferred to more radical measures is to say that actions outside established legal and political channels are to be taken only, From his adolescence to the end of his life, Martin Luther King, Jr., found inspiration in the promise inherent in the Declaration of Independence, although he was acutely aware that for black Americans, that promise had gone unfulfilled. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way . To its proponents, led by King, the idea of civil disobedience represents a compelling linkage of morality and efficacy, a happy marriage of moral ends to moral means in the pursuit of social or political reform. In the years that followed, King would radicalize his calls for civil disobedience. " is the official definition from the Britannica Encyclopedia. Nor did he address in the Letter the implications of his idea of equality for other, more difficult questions pertaining to justice in race relations and to the cause of social and political equality in generalquestions controversial even among proponents of equality. The difficulty appears first in the fact that, as King at times acknowledged, his expansive, second-phase conception of rights was rooted in principles outside Americas constitutional tradition: We have left the realm of constitutional rights, he remarked in Where Do We Go From Here? Then, the action taken has to be non-violent. The difficulty in Kings position appears still more challenging in light of the impressive victories equal-rights activists had achieved over the previous two decades by a combination of political pressure and legal challenges. 51, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.[REF] Madison followed the teaching of John Locke, who explained in his Second Treatise of Government that the first and fundamental positive law of all commonwealths is the establishing of the legislative power, which stands as the supreme power of the common-wealth.[REF], The constitutional primacy of the legislative power is the institutional corollary of the rule of law. Here, for King, are the primary and overarching conditions of morally sound protest: As a subclass of nonviolent protest, civil disobedience in Kings understanding is marked by: Kings awareness of the power of civil disobedience as a protest method quickened in the course of his first nonviolent direct-action campaign, the Montgomery bus boycott, and developed further as he reflected on the sit-in movement initiated by black college students in early 1960. Kings distinction between disobedience that is evasive or defiant and disobedience marked by acceptance of the authority of law is vividly meaningful in context. People who engage in it do not wish to inflict any damage but to raise awareness and make their views known to the authorities. In the fourth of his Massey Lectures,[REF] delivered in late 1967 and published under the title, The Trumpet of Conscience, he stated: There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. What is Civil Disobedience? JoanSpero and Jeffrey Hart, "Democracy." The Politics of International Economic Relations. So understood, Kings later idea of civil disobedience is properly if bluntly characterized as a form of extortion clothed in moral purposes. The discussion begins with a consideration of Americas founding principles, focusing in particular on the natural-rights principles summarized in the Declaration of Independence, and then moves to an extended analysis of the arguments of Martin Luther King, Jr. Civil disobedience is simply not like other acts in which menstand up courageously for their principles. This upsurge appears unlikely soon to abate. In his very first public speech (as a prizewinner in his high schools oratory contest), King protested that decades after Emancipation, Black America still lives in chains. For the remainder of his secondary and advanced education, he searched for the proper means, as he put it in that initial speech, to cast down the last barrier to perfect freedom., I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could nameif ten, During my student days at Morehouse, King wrote, I read Thoreaus essay Civil Disobedience for the first time. In circumstances justifying greater forms of disobedience, it is reasonable to infer that lesser forms are permissible. Because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. King called this modified conception a more mature form of civil disobedience. Secure .gov websites use HTTPS However, the climate necessity defense is not without controversy. 2. If civil disobedience is a political exercise, there are good normative and pragmatic reasons for adhering to non-violence. When Locke said the ruling power ought to govern by law, he meant that the law must rule so that both the people may know their duty and the rulers too kept within their bounds.. One might also discern in Kings eagerness to deploy the language of revolution and natural rights in preference to that of constitutional law a certain zeal for revolution at odds with his insistence on respect for positive law. To such questions King offered no compelling answers. For enthusiasts of rightful disobedience (civil or not), events such as the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement serve as congenial examplesbut the participants in the slaveholders rebellion of 1861 and the mid-20th century campaign of massive resistance to desegregation no less firmly believed their causes to be just. In the recent wave of protests and calls for protest one can find semblances of the first approach, but those more closely resembling the second model have predominated. This thought informs his views about when civil disobedience is justified. In the Letter, King indicated that the sources of his thinking about the moral law were eclectic. He proudly described his movement as a mass-action crusade, but by insisting on proper training and character formation, he made clear that not simply anyone was suitable for direct-action protest and civil disobedience: Not all who volunteered could pass our strict tests.[REF]. To say that less radical measures are to be preferred to more radical measures is to say that actions outside established legal and political channels are to be taken only where necessary and only so far as necessary. AFF (Civil Disobedience is morally justified in a democracy) Value: Criteria: AFF CONSTRUCTION: Civil disobedience in a democracy is morally justified because _____ a. Contention 1: Necessity i. Many types of objections to civil disobedience have been raised, often based on the view that citizens in a democracy are obliged to obey the law. An aggrieved minority also has a right to take actions necessary and proper to prevent or correct governmental or societal transgressions.[REF]. He claims that the government's power is based more on the influence that the majority possesses rather than . It is the non-violent, noncompliance with unjust laws that is ordered towards changing the laws. The training that protesters received was rigorous in itself, but the moral formation King judged requisite to nonviolent protest and properly civil disobedience required more than any relatively brief workshop could produce. There must be more than a statement to the larger society; there must be a force that interrupts its functioning at some key point Mass civil disobedience as a new stage of struggle can transmute the deep rage of the ghetto into a constructive and creative force. The proliferation of civil disobedience in recent times has prompted questions about violence and justified resistance. His argument for civil disobedience in the later phase of his career diverges significantly from the relatively moderate argument he presented in his earlier, more successful phase. Acknowledging the seriousness of any act of lawbreaking, King recognized his responsibility to explain the criteria for judging the injustice of law and the rightfulness of disobedience. In this respect, his dissatisfaction with the half a loaf gained in previous decades applied also to his movements accomplishments, which marked, in his view, not the end of its work but only the end of the beginning, as President Lyndon Johnson said in anticipation of the Voting Rights Act.[REF]. Such exposure is a condition to be avoided at all costs; to escape or avoid it is the primary objective in the formation of political society. Kings later conception departs, too, from his earlier insistence that civil disobedience must be practiced in a spirit of respect for law, respect for democratic governance, and redemptive good will, manifesting a desire for reconciliation with ones erstwhile adversaries. The practice of civil disobedience required a special kind of personmeaning, in most cases, a specially. The failure of federal authorities to adopt antipoverty measures on the scheduleand in the degree and kind he desirednecessitated, in Kings view, a new round of protests. Absolute arbitrary power, Locke maintained, is equivalent to governing without settled standing laws, and to be subject to it is to be exposed to the worst evils of a state of war with another. Civil disobedience is a form of civil war An act of civil disobedience sets a precedence of breaking the law. You are in a real way depriving him of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, denying in his case the very creed of his society. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking.. In his first book, Stride Toward Freedom, King recalled the discoveries that would supply the moral power for the social revolution he envisioned. Moreover, the most prominent eruptions in the past decade of what supporters persist in calling civil disobedience, including the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the anti-Trump Resistance,. All will bear in mind this sacred principle, Thomas Jefferson noted, that the will of the majority to be rightful must be reasonable, and to be reasonable it must respect the equal rights of the minority. What sort of person, marked by what sorts of qualities, volunteers for such training in the first place? Granted, the commitment pledge did not quite signify a religious test for participation; it required meditation on Jesuss teaching, not worship of Jesus, and it required prayer to a God of love, not necessarily to the God Christians recognize. The conclusion seems inescapable that in his desperate zeal to add rapid socioeconomic uplift to his movements previous victories in securing civil and political rights, King again neglected a piece of wise counsel from Rustin, who observed: There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement which would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that absence of power also corrupts., One of the great glories of democracy, King remarked at the outset of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is the right to protest for right.. "The refusal to obey the demands or commands of a government or occupying power, without resorting to violence or active measures of opposition; its usual purpose is to force concessions from the government or occupying power. He believed that among the available channels for such demands, action via the court system was at best dilatory and often ineffectual; it needed reinforcement by direct-action, demonstrative protest. Finally, as for the principle that civil disobedience may be practiced only by people of properly formed character, Kings call for an expanded and disruptive campaign of civil disobedience did include a training period. Above all, because the right to civil disobedience is intelligible only as a corrective of rulers lawlessness, it must not itself foster lawlessness. When these attempts are turned back, civil disobedience then becomes a viable option. Thus originated the famous Letter from Birmingham Jail., The objection was familiar to King. The substitutes for civil disobedience in a democracy include the court system, and at another level, the legis-lature. is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as "Refusal to obey governmental demands or commands, especially as a nonviolent and usually collective mean. Reduced to its essence, Kings response appears in a simple, if paradoxical formulation: Civil disobedience is not lawlessness but instead a higher form of lawfulness. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice.[REF] He also rejected the error Kilpatrick had ascribed to him, a reliance on conscience to distinguish just and unjust laws that reduces in practice to a mere idiosyncratic choice. 2. It is meaningful, if unsurprising, that the SCLC required of protesters a commitment suffused with the moral spirit of Christianity. That sort of care is especially needed at the present time. The difficulty appears first in the fact that, as King at times acknowledged, his expansive, second-phase conception of rights was rooted in principles outside Americas constitutional tradition: We have left the realm of constitutional rights, he remarked in, A corollary of Kings earlier position that civil disobedience may be practiced only where necessary is that such disobedience should cease as soon as possiblei.e., as soon as the necessary reforms are achieved or lawful, political avenues to their achievement become available. Is civil disobedience morally OK because governments aren't progressive enough when it comes to protecting non-humans? Although his zeal for prompt reform moved him at times to transgress his own prudential regulations, in his earlier phase King showed himself to be a more sober and careful exponent of civil disobedience than the despairing, radicalized King of the second phase, advocate of the disruptive, disorderly mode of disobedience lately prevalent. 10. It is justifiable, in exceptional circumstances, by the first principles of free, constitutional government, but it is dangerous in that it poses a threat to the rule of law. Civil disobedience in a democracy is not morally justified because it poses an unacceptable threat to the rule of law. Kings Achievement. Two years later, a riot in Detroit wrought even greater destruction.[REF]. On what ground could he continue in his second-phase arguments to affirm the moral imperative of nonviolence, given his justification of coercion? What defensible basis is there for his finding of a core of nonviolence in acts of intimidation against persons and of violence against property? King characterized poverty and unemployment as deprivations of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and he conceived of poverty as a form of segregation. Despite its shortcomings, the initial model, epitomized in Kings Letter from Birmingham Jail, was marked by a high degree of moral discipline, by professions of conscientious respect for law and for Americas founding principles, and, not by mere coincidence, a remarkable degree of success in achieving its practical objectives. Kings apologetic discussion of the rioting raises troubling questions. Further, it should be clear that the imperative subjection to the rule of law applies no less to the people themselves, as represented by a ruling majority, than to government. Americas founding principles of natural rights and the rule of law permit the practice of civil disobedience narrowly conceived.
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